FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional server system 10. The server system 10 includes a processor 12 which is coupled to a main memory 14. The processor 12 is coupled via its private bus (GX) 16 to systems which include a network interface system 18. The network interface system 18 is in turn coupled to an adapter 20 via a PCI bus 22 or the like. As is well known, the PCI 22 bus has a limited bandwidth which affects the amount of traffic that can flow therethrough.
The internet and its applications have tremendously increased the number of clients' requests a server has to satisfy. Each client's request generates both network and storage I/Os. In addition, the advent of 10 gigabit Ethernet and IP storage makes it possible to consolidate the data center communications on a single backbone infrastructure: Ethernet, TCP/IP.
However, TCP/IP protocol at 10 gigabit speed consumes tremendous processing and memory bandwidth in the mainstream servers, therefore severely limiting server's ability to run applications.
In today's server network interface controllers (NICs) limited offloading of functions such as TCP and IP checksums, Large Send (or TCP Segmentation Offload) is supported. However, these functions are adequate up to 1 G, but do not solve the problem for higher speeds such as 10 G and higher.
It is known to use a TCP offload engine to totally offload the complete TCP/IP protocol stack from the server. However, the TOE's implementation is generally implemented in hardware or in picocode in pico processor architectures which are relatively complex. There are also debugging, problem determination and stack maintainability issues. In addition, there are scability issues when using picocode because picoengines do not follow main processor roadmap. Finally, the offload engines typically introduce new protocols and APIs and thus require changes in applications as well as interoperability issues.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method for allowing for high bandwidth data in an Ethernet environment that overcomes the above-identified problems. The present invention addresses such a need.